I can’t recall another time when the City was ordered by any court to tap into a racially-restricted channel of applicants for an open-competitive civil service examination.

   As a city resident, I wonder why so much attention is paid to the Vulcans, a purely political group, but apparently none to the opinions of the people who actually live in the community that will, supposedly, enjoy the protection of the firefighters.

   The article states that the home visits are a “pilot program” that is part of the court’s ongoing oversight of the department’s hiring practices, which have shown a “history of discriminatory testing procedures”.  It also said that the federal monitor, Mark Cohen,  ”found potential value” in the visits, which will serve as an “informal support mechanism” for the underrepresented group.  The suggestion was that it’s the kind of thing that non-minorities benefit from every day.

   Well, I can think of something else with “potential value”.  Why shouldn’t the members of the community compile their own list of qualified but “non-racially categorized” applicants?  I checked the city’s website and it said that the filing period for the exam closed on September 15, 2011.  But closed for whom?  Does this mean that Judge Garaufis has re-opened it, but only for minorities who “incompletely” showed an interest in the job, but then dropped the idea?

   Judge Garaufis has seemingly introduced new elements into the court’s oversight of this process:  to open a separate channel of racially-screened applicants under exclusive federal control; to seize the administration of civil service laws from city and state agencies; to deny to non-minorities the same opportunity to apply for an open-competitive exam as it extends to minority groups.

   However the judge and the Vulcans characterize this unprecedented maneuver, I hope it is tested by renewed public involvement.  We should encourage any qualified person looking for a good job, regardless of race, to consider becoming a New York City firefighter, and to apply now, without delay.  In other words, let’s “taint” this monitor’s pool and see what he tries to toss back.

•  I watch “Morning Joe” every weekday, and I’m going to do something despicable now.  I’m going to suggest a cast replacement.  I’ve never done it before, and it sickens me…well, maybe not. But I think it would improve the show. 

   Get rid of Mika.  Let her read the news or get her own talk show, but it’s a drag to see her so squirmy and stick-up-her-ass about Joe when he plays to his gang of stooges.  He eats it up, especially since he knows she can’t land a glove on him.  The solution? Get Joy Behar.  She showed on her now cancelled show that she can ad lib zingers, and she’s more informed than some of the GOP debaters.  More important, she can pierce through the grunts of that pen of hogs and go toe-to-toe with the host.  Test her out!

•  It’s holiday season, and you know what that means…another Weinstein Oscar attack!  Harvey will be pushing for a Best Actress for Michelle Williams as MM for My Week With Marilyn.  Not a chance.  Michelle Williams is sexier as herself than as Marilyn, who was unique.  Oh, she does the voice and the poses OK, but whenever she moves, you can see the difference.  Marilyn trained each body part to move in a separate direction, and the effect, especially when sheathed, was electric.  Sorry, Michelle, but you don’t pass the Flatbush garage calendar test.

   But the bigger disaster is Kenneth Branagh as Olivier.  With that pasty complexion and John C. Reilly schnozz?  Come off it!  Still, the only witty scene in the movie is when Branaugh does his eye makeup.  Each of Olivier’s eyebrows deserved a special Oscar of its own, and it was good to see them honored at last.   

This entire transaction took 20 minutes!  I had tickets to the NY Philharmonic last night but the Gem Queen, Susan, had a headache.  I called the boxoffice (first a recording but – amazingly! - a real person within two minutes), and I was told I could handle an exchange over the phone.  But what was the schedule?

Before going to it, I logged on to MOMA because of the “Contenders” film series; I didn’t want a conflict.  I saw the complete schedule, and wrote down the dates.  Then I went to the Philharmonic site and perused the schedule for the concerts.  I picked three alternate dates, and called the boxoffice again.  I selected a date in January – for Bruckner’s 8th under Zubin Mehta – and completed the exchange.  It was a pure swap, at no cost.

When I think about how I would have done this - a mere thirty years ago! – I am speechless.  I can say honestly that I would never have believed that I could have had such detailed information available to me  – within minutes! – by using a small electronic device.

Can we place this in context?  Looking at the arc of human history, I mean.  Roughly speaking, the change in plain everyday experience in the past fifty years is greater than the leap from the 18th to the 20th century. I don’t think that people my daughter’s age can appreciate that.  Not yet, perhaps, but possibly when she looks at the innovative leaps that will transform her own world, and that leave her as awestruck as I am today.

• I read the obituary of an American named William Niskanen today.  I had never heard of him, but I read it because he was intriguingly identified as a “libertarian economist”.  I learned that he served in the Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan, and that he was controversial because he spoke his mind bluntly, and therefore embarrassed the government.  Throughout his career, he took risky public positions, from condemning tariffs to calling for reduced public spending, and he seemed to like the attention he got whenever he leveled criticism at accepted policy.  The writer of the obit, David Segal, kept it simple and short, but he clearly admired the man.  I know that I want to know more about him.                             
•  The obit included a fact, however, that reduced the lustre somewhat.  It mentioned a speech he gave before a women’s group, while he was in the Administration, where he opined that the reason women were paid less than men was because they interrupted their careers to raise a family.  Even in the eighties, though, this was debatable, but it is startling for another reason: it highlights how different our culture is today.  I think that today, more than at any time in history, women are raised to believe that they can become a competitive, even dominant force in the economy, and that they don’t have to sacrifice the dream of having a stable, rewarding family life.  I’m not saying that most of them will ever achieve that; the odds are against it.  But the odds are better today, I think, than it is for men.                                                                        
• Here’s a TV note.  The recent episode on HBO’s “Bored to Death”, the one with Dick Cavett as a guest, reminded me that, with Larry David on hiatus, there was still a place you could find something that seems to have been abandoned by the rest of television: the good, old-fashioned belly laugh.                                                                                                                                           
• I’ll keep you informed on the development of my new mobile application.  It’s called Re-Election?™.  It’s going to offer a convenient and simple guide to voters on whether to send that clown who’s currently in office back for another term, or to give another clown a chance.

   Kimelman was never considered one of the major players.  Although the charges he faced could have led to a multi-decade term, he was offered a deal two years ago that would have meant no jail time at all.  But he wouldn’t plead guilty and, after the verdict, the judge sentenced him to thirty months and a large fine.

   For me, who doesn’t know the facts in detail, this was a disappointment.  Sure, he broke the law, and will have to pay.  I accept that.  In fact, I disagree with those who feel that insider trading, which is the gravamen of his offense, is a victimless crime.  When the market is rigged like that, some sap will lose money because he bought the shares that Kimelman needed to dump, and who wouldn’t have bought if he knew the truth.

   Still, what saddens me is that Kimelman wanted to fight.  He wanted to take on a system that is so overwhelmingly weighted against him that he takes on the aura of a hero, even if it is misapplied in his case.  You see, he inspires sympathy because of the deal itself.  I would have felt no sympathy if the feds had gone directly to trial, even if it resulted in a bigger sentence.  At least that would have shown the government’s commitment to the law, and to the truth. But, at least  in the prosecution of the law, the truth is a luxury the government gave up a long time ago, to its enrichment.  What counts now is making the deal, like the closing of a sale.  And they will stack all possible charges and permutations of charges to force the target to yield.  The law allows that.  Juries can now be offered a tasty buffet of charges, and it doesn’t matter if they are all derived from one stupid act…even the making a single phone call.  On top of that, they can add any “misstatement” told the police during the investigation, just as if that was equal to the original crime. 

   Still, while I can’t say that offering the deal was morally wrong, Kimelman’s conviction was repellent.   And I say that with absolute confidence that I could have found him guilty, if an objective review of the evidence demanded it, if I had served on his jury.  It is absolutely necessary to find the corruption and to stop it.  But the system  we have today has costs that I find unacceptable, and which are usually ignored.  Kimelman may not deserve my sympathy, but he was only targeted to cast him in a role in the larger drama.  You can be sure that the deal he rejected required his testimony against Rajaratnam, and perhaps others.  The government believes that threatening any accused person with outrageously exaggerated charges is a necessary part of its campaign against the “big fish” target, and it seems to work more often than not.  When a small player like Kimelman mistakenly thinks he can beat the system, whether due to blind egotism or bad legal advice, he can get a rude awakening.

   I hope that Kimelman is consoled by the fact that his decision has served the interests of the public, which has benefitted from its knowledge of the truth.  Not all of it, of course, due to limits under the rules of evidence, but surely more than we would have known without the trial.  I only mourn the hidden costs of this system.  We seem to have accepted the fact that merely charging an American with crimes is justified under a plain cost-benefit analysis.  Whether the charges are true or not seems to be irrelevant.

   Crime thrillers are perfect for this because you expect, and are usually given, a lift along with the downer ending. The downer is that the “hero” will definitely not triumph in any material sense.  He will not get the money, the girl or the freedom to live free from his past, and often enough he’ll die violently.  But the lift is what keeps the genre alive.  It usually means a just revenge or the successful sacrifice of the hero for the safety of some innocent person, usually a woman or a child.  Jean-Pierre Melville worked this formula memorably.  Some recent examples are Johnny To’s Exiled or John Flynn’s underrated City of Industry. 

   Drive gives you both the woman and the child, and the setup is a little different this time.  The hero (always put “anti” before the word) drives cars.  That’s it, he just drives , like it’s a bodily function. But he also gets paid for it; as a stunt driver for the movies or tv, and as a getaway driver for heists. Oh, and he is cool.   McQueen cool.  Only – and this is kind of an inside joke - where Steve McQueen’s Bullitt and Thomas Crown lived like GQ deities, this guy flops in a dump apartment in LA, and his furniture looks picked off the sidewalk.

   I know, I know, McQueen was a cop in Bullitt, not a criminal.  But when it comes to coolness, it hardly makes a difference.  McQueen played his cops and his crooks the same way.  The defining thing is being a loner, someone who will not fit in with the wage-slave mediocrities who pay to see movies about cool guys who live by their own code.  And besides, Gosling’s physical resemblance to McQueen can’t be accidental.

   Anyway, Driver falls hard for the girl, who is a neighbor with a cute little boy.  Refn wisely makes the kid just this side of bearable; loveable, but no sitcom wiseass.  Mr. Cool would never fall for that.  The story is a clever combo of protecting these two after the woman’s husband is killed – after taking the mob’s money in a bungled job - and battling a pair of mobsters who are pretty cool too, only evil.  I’m talking 21st century icons of evil, the kind who use razors as rhetorical devices.

   The best thing about the film, which will also bring it buzz, is Albert Brooks as the crime boss.  Unlike other casting brow-raisers we’ve seen (think Tom Cruise in Magnolia), this one works because Brooks plays the guy pretty much the same as his comic roles.  He is chilling when he explains to a longtime friend why he has to kill him – which he does, with icy swiftness, while he is talking - because he sounds exactly like he’s apologizing for having to leave early from his daughter’s birthday party: affectionate and consoling.

   Carey Mulligan has been criticized for a lack of chemistry with Gosling.  But it’s a nothing role, and she is fine.  If she were my neighbor, I’d surely invent some excuse to knock on her door.

   Actually, I think Gosling is the real problem.  This character is not only violent when he has to be, but is absolutely confident about himself.  He reacts instinctively to danger, not cerebrally, and he is never wrong (that final scene notwithstanding).  But Gosling doesn’t convince  in this.  He doesn’t look used by the world, as someone without hope.  He still comes across as an assistant principal type, like he thinks it’s all fixed when you talk with the guy over a beer. I sense that Refn saw this and tried to resolve the problem, but not successfully. When Gosling tells Mulligan he’d like to live with her and her son, he is absolutely sincere about it, which denies everything we know about the character.  At least Mulligan sees how ridiculous this is, and she gives him a good slap.

   Still, Drive satisfies by being true to formula.  The ending is abrupt, and at first seems unresolved.  But then you remember the film’s title, which tells it all, and it is just right.

1) It look like Rick Perry won’t cut it.  It’s not his gaffes; those never count.  It’s because it all seems so familiar and, well, juiceless.  Maybe because he waited so long for his big entrance.  Sure, he upstaged HER big moment, but why?  I’m afraid the answer may be because it’s the only purpose of his candidacy.  Maybe his “handlers” felt it would start the big surge, but that bombed.  It seems clear that he was pushed into this because GOP Central thinks its only chance is to…

2) Stop Michele!!  But now it seems that it won’t.  She’s determined to run, and she will run.  Just not as the Republican nominee.   She’ll ride into the convention in no better than third place, and she will be DISSED!  After she and her legions leave in a huff, she will beat the drum as the 3rd Party nom on every ballot.  Probably not every ballot, but enough to doom the ticket of the traitors.

3) Rest assured, Obama will win because of this.  But she won’t care any more than she did about the debt ceiling.  Nor the rest of her makeshift congregation.  They will have triumphed in the only thing they cared about: to tell Republicans who have betrayed conservative ideals that they are the real enemy.  Never again can the true believers be counted on, not after W’s embrace of the heathen faith. Sure, the Progressives, like buzzing locusts, will swarm and cover the earth for a year or two, like always.  Holy plagues come and go.  But true conservatism is scripture.

   The tone of the article was the usual NYT product, emphasizing the disparity in disciplinary action between minority students and the general student body.  Specifically, minorities were more likely to get the harsher out-of-school suspensions, rather than the in-school suspensions that white students received.  It also noted that minorities were more often clustered in “alternative” classrooms, which “some have complained” have less qualified teachers.

   Familiar as all this is, something else about it rankled.  It was the phrase, in parenthesis, “(The nature of the offenses was not noted.)”  It just stopped me cold.  Why, I thought, did that seem peculiar?  Reflecting on it, I realized that there was much significance in that choice of words.  And of making it parenthetical as well, as if it could be flicked off, a meaningless afterthought.

   But this was not “after” but “forethought”, and it explained the motive behind the study in the first place.  The clear intent was to throw the disparity of treatment in stark relief, to have it framed in isolation as ”pure” injustice and discrimination.  This would not be possible if the reader was reminded of the function of the discipline; namely to safeguard against harm to the student body and the staff, and to preserve an atmosphere that promotes learning.

   I am convinced that these well-meaning attempts to highlight the disparity in negative results for “victim” groups is harmful to all concerned.  The article notes the growing concern with balancing “classroom order with individual student need”.  Is that what it’s about? Classroom order ?  I think not.  And I don’t think that studies of student discipline that conveniently fail to note “the nature of the offenses” will persuade anyone to “balance” the safety of our children with useless gestures of tolerance for dangerous behavior.

   At nine days, the boy is busy absorbing new fluids, the reality that will bathe him the rest of his days.  The warm wetness of womblife is past.  He squirms as I cradle him, but then relaxes.  Suddenly his large deep blue eyes fix into my own gaze.  Does he sense that he is loved?  When next he is held by me, will he remember?

   His solution? Why, another WPA project of government works, he says, one that repairs our fast decaying infrastructure.

   Did I read that right?  Another WPA?  Krugman still believes that because it worked the last time — or almost worked, at least until FDR recoiled and tried to balance the budget — that it can work this time if only we carry out the program fully.  He also seems to believe that the damned obstructionist Republicans are the only obstacle, but that because they are pitifully devoid of coherence and leadership now (no argument there), we might actually get the chance to do it right this time.

   Provided Obama mans up and unifies his own party behind him.

   Is that all there is to it?  I think not.

   What Krugman seems to overlook about jobs created as part of a frantic, jerry-built public program like that is that those jobs give no real boost to the economy at all, and that the increased debt only adds more dead weight.  The marketplace doesn’t need that.  What it needs is something that sharpens the public’s appetite enough so that they are willing to wait in line for the product.  And, yes, I’m am talking about the IPad2.  Only we need at least half a dozen more like it.  Although this country no longer produces the absolute best in consumer goods, we remain the leader in marketing and distribution on a massive scale.  I think we need government to partner with our largest employers, as well as our most promising startup companies, to break into foreign markets at a level of penetration that we haven’t seen for years.

   Stoke the demand first; the jobs will follow.

The New Woody

   Just a brief word on Midnight in Paris.  Yes, it is a delight, and his wittiest script since Deconstructing Harry.  But that Times article on the artists from the 20′s portrayed in the  film slipped up big time.  The mini gaffe was not to mention that hideous, and hilarious, faux Picasso.  Supposedly a portrait of his fictional mistress, this goofy doodle was as witty a parody as any of the pretentious bilge uttered by his imaginary Hemingway.

   But the bigger gaffe made that one a trifle.  The article misidentified the Bunuel film about the dinner guests who couldn’t leave as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.  It was actually The Exterminating Angel (1962).